Nearly every contact center uses more than one channel to provide services to customers.

Many modern contact centers even deliver services through three or more channels. If you aren’t delivering services on the channels that your customers use the most, you are missing opportunities to connect with them on a daily basis. The contact center provides organizations with the ability to unify customer experience across channels, but how can you ensure that your agents are also providing a unified experience?

Omnichannel agents

Enabling your agents to use all contact center channels is the key to unifying customer experience. Providing your agents with the ability to use all contact channels ensures that customers receive the same experience regardless of what channel they are using. Many customers use multiple channels to interact with organizations, so having the ability to obtain the same information and the same level of service across channels is crucial.

Omnichannel efficiency

Enabling agents for all contact channels means a significant increase in efficiency. Having agents handling multiple contact types means that no agent sits idle when the volume for a specific channel is low. If the contact center is not receiving many emails, this means that the agent can still handle voice calls while volumes are low. This means less idle time for agents, shorter wait times for customers, and a unification of contact channels.

Getting up to speed

Many contact centers have agents that handle specific contact channels, but are not trained to handle other types. For example, a voice agent may not be trained for social media interactions, or an IM agent may not be trained to handle voice calls. This training barrier can present a major issue in contact centers that handle a number of contact types.

ice Contact Center helps organizations overcome this. ice handles voice calls, emails and IMs in the same format they are received in. However, all other contact types take advantage of these three channels for agent handling purposes. For example, social media messages are handled by agents as IMs, as are SMS messages. Social media posts are handled by agents as emails. Any contact type in ice is handled as voice, IM or email. This provides a unique opportunity to organizations, as they can train omnichannel agents, simply by training them on three contact types.

Contiguous: sharing a common border; next or together in sequence.

Contiguous communication is the fabric that holds together the contact center of the future. It provides the contact center with the ability to unify the customer experience across any device, media format and channel. Contiguous communication enables agents and customers alike to switch between modalities and media formats in an instant.

In this biweekly blog series, we will present the capabilities and features made possible by contiguous communication. First, we want to discuss the ability to switch modalities in an instant.

Contiguous communication enables the linkage of customer profiles across channels. This enables customers to switch channels while continuing to interact with the same agent on the same contact. Switching channels in real time is a crucial feature for customers that may be on the go, or lose access to a specific channel. For example, a customer using instant messaging may need to get in the car and drive, so they no longer have access to the instant messaging channel. Contiguous communication enables the customer to switch from instant messaging to a phone call in real time, so that they can continue the conversation without interrupting their daily activities.

The objective of contiguous communication is to make the customer experience feel natural and effortless. In a digital world, your business no longer competes only with your competitors. You are competing with the customer experience provided by device manufacturers, application developers and any other business-customer touchpoint. Customers have a short attention span, and if their experience is not effortless, they will become frustrated and give up.

Contiguous communication helps your organization make leaps ahead in customer experience. If you want to provide exceptional experiences that set you apart from competitors, you need the power of contiguous communication in your contact center. To learn more, contact us here.

Mobile has become the centerpiece of today’s customer experience.

Without leveraging mobile, your organization is missing a crucial (and constantly growing) piece of the customer experience strategy. So why is mobile often siloed from the rest of your customer touchpoints?

The good news is that we can help you remove that silo. Bringing mobile as a channel into your contact center ensures that you deliver effective and personalized experiences to your customers- anywhere, anytime.

In this live webinar, we will discuss:

• The benefits of leveraging mobile as a gateway into your organization via the contact center

• A real-life example of how mobile integration helped an organization deliver powerful experiences to its customers

• How you can easily add contact center functionality to a new or existing customer-facing mobile app

• Live mobile app demonstration

Whether you are building a mobile app from scratch, or have an existing one, ComputerTalk’s ice Mobile SDK can bring mobile web chat capabilities to your customers. By connecting your mobile app to the contact center, you can leverage the power of context and proactive engagement to create groundbreaking customer experiences.

Join us for this webinar and learn how to connect with your customers in ways that you never thought possible!

About our blog

We are firm believers in Lync Unified Communications and the benefits it brings to the business communication world. We are excited to share some of the things we’ve learned about Lync development, custom Lync applications, and Lync issue resolutions.

The Blog Team consists of employees from different departments, so you will get different perspectives on various topics that are relevant in the Telecommunications industry.

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